


Something Good

by laetificat



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-08-23 05:00:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16612388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laetificat/pseuds/laetificat
Summary: Karen remembers thinking that this is what happens when you try to hold on to something not meant for you.Pre-game. How Karen and Mary-Beth first met.





	Something Good

**Author's Note:**

> this WIP has been sitting in my GDocs for a while, waiting for an ending. I'm glad I finally found one. these ladies deserve a little bit of love.
> 
> maybe at some point I'll write a follow up to this about how they join the gang..

Karen remembers finding a rock. 

She was just a girl at the time, sent out of the hovel her family called home by her mother, wanting her out from under her feet so she could finish the laundry in peace. The day was hot and humid, full of the promise of a late summer storm, clouds stacked on the horizon in great bruise-black walls. 

She remembers seeing it, half-hidden in a tuft of grass. She remembers that it glittered, but perhaps that’s just a fancy and it didn’t really glitter, more likely it was a plain grey rock just like all of the other plain grey rocks that covered the ground. But it did look interesting, and so she went over and picked it up, turning it over in her little hands. 

She remembers, vividly, the shape of the tiny fish that was imposed on the rock. At the time she didn’t know what a fish was, really, but she knew enough to realise that it was something special. Each tiny delicate fin defined, each fragile bone pressed into the smooth surface of the rock just as if it was someone’s footprint. A moment in time, an entire life, captured forever.

It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

Of course, she brought it inside to show her mother and her father. 

Karen remembers the way her father looked at it, frowning, then put it in his pocket. She had protested and asked to keep it, but he had swatted her hand away and told her to go help her ma. 

She remembers him coming home the next evening, so drunk that his body reeked of it despite rain coming down in jagged sheets and dripping through their poorly clinked roof. Boasting of how he sold the rock in the saloon to a collector for ten dollars, and when her mother asked if he’d kept a share of the takings to feed his family he’d sworn at her, and swung his fist, but he was too drunk and it just sent him toppling over, falling onto his face in the churned mud and horse shit of the yard. 

She remembers how her mother had slammed the door on him, then put her head in her hands and sobbed, for that money that could have fed them was lying out in the rain, worse than useless. 

And even then, Karen remembers thinking that this is what happens when you try to hold on to something not meant for you.

*

They meet, as it turns out, because they both pick the same man to swindle. He's a perfect mark: wealthy and stupid enough to be wearing a silk vest and a pocket watch in a dirt-poor ranch town; just drunk enough to be loud, but not yet drunk enough to be making a mess of himself. He lounges against the bar, eyeing up the women who stand in small groups at the edges of the room.

Mary-Beth reaches him first, slipping her arm into his. She introduces herself, compliments him on his fine jacket, his excellent choice of whiskey.

“Why, you're a woman of taste and refinement,” he points out, patting her hand. 

“Oh, well, I just know what I want,” Mary-Beth replies in a low voice, leaning in a little to make her meaning clear. He smiles at her fondly, perhaps entertaining a brief fantasy of how he might take her away from this squalor and deprivation, or similar misguided thoughts.

After a little more dancing about the subject, Mary-Beth tells him she knows somewhere they can go to “be private”. She leads him out the door of the saloon, rather like a farmer leading a prize cow. 

Karen watches her go, hiding a smile behind her paper fan.

*

Mary-Beth returns an hour or so later, not a single hair out of place. If her purse is a little fatter and her eyes a little keener with the taste of the hunt, well, there's nobody who will pay that much mind.

Except for Karen.

She waits for Mary-Beth at the bar, nursing herself a glass of the house moonshine (which looks and smells -- and tastes, probably -- rather like horse liniment, but Karen has never been one to fuss over such things). 

Mary-Beth slides into the spot beside her, her eyes already darting around the room for her next mark. She smells like lavender and rosewater, perhaps a little too strongly, but that’s no bad thing. Karen admires the spray of freckles across her cheeks and collarbone. No wonder she feels the need to be full of herself.

“I've seen what you're doing,” Karen murmurs. 

Mary-Beth looks sideways at her, surprise registering briefly in her expression. Karen is pleased to see it. She enjoys it when people underestimate her. The role of a battered old slattern is easy, but effective.

“I don't know what you mean,” Mary-Beth huffs, tossing her head. She turns and lifts a hand to signal the bartender. 

Karen reaches out and takes her wrist, not hard, but firm enough to make a point. Mary-Beth startles, her eyes going wide, the picture of innocence affronted. Oh, she is good.

“I said, I've seen what you're doin’. And I want to make something clear. This here is my town and my place, I’ve worked hard to establish myself here, so if you think you can come in and drink my well dry I have news for you.” Karen doesn't quite snarl -- that would not be ladylike -- but she puts an edge of a threat on her words.

She expects Mary-Beth to snatch her hand back and yelp something silly before flouncing out for good. But the girl surprises her. She doesn't tug herself free from Karen's grip, but looks at her, the sweetness gone from her expression and replaced by something harder and colder. Karen is reminded of hunting with her brother and starting up an old wolf bitch from her den. The wolf had looked at them with the same steady, calculating gaze, before slinking off into the brush. 

“I ain't goin’,” Mary-Beth says finally. 

“Then I'm afraid this ain't gonna be pretty --” Karen begins, her free hand drifting down to the knife concealed in her skirts. 

“I can't go!” Mary-Beth hisses, and suddenly Karen can see the fear underneath the bravado, propping it up like a rotten log liable to collapse any second. “I can't go back out there. Please. I came here alone, along the river road. A group of men -- they overcame me. They.. what if they’re waiting..” she stutters to a halt. 

Karen lets go of her wrist and sighs. She notices now the poorly applied powder along the girl’s jaw line, covering the shadow of bruises. The shallow scrapes on her knuckles.

She knows what those feel like. Too damn well, she knows.

“Fine,” Karen mutters, waving her fingers to flag down the bartender. “But I’m takin’ fifty percent of what you make tonight. And God help you if you try to cheat me.” 

Mary-Beth starts like she wants to protest, but thinks better of it. Instead, she holds out her hand.

“Deal.”

*

They work well together, it’s clear from the start. Karen spends a good time telling Mary-Beth about the relative qualities and foibles of the men standing at the bar, then sets her on them like a hawk released from the wrist. They make enough in one night to cover their room and board for another week, but their game is halted when the saloon owner catches on and tosses them out, saying he doesn’t run that kind of establishment and they’re lucky he doesn’t call the sheriff on them.

They flee the town in Mary-Beth’s wagon and ride through the night, Karen holding her shotgun ready across her lap, only stopping when the orange light of dawn bleeds across the sky. 

It’s not just the men of the river road that they fear.

In the next town they do better, since it has a whorehouse already and the men are used to being approached by women asking for a moment of their time (although perhaps they’re not so used to being knocked on the head and left in the dirt of the stable with their pockets turned inside-out). But they keep moving, Karen knowing well to keep ahead of the law and nasty rumours.

And so it goes, for days and weeks. Always running. 

Some nights they spend out in the wilderness. Mary-Beth proves herself to be a canny shot, even using a rusted out old rifle with crooked sights. She takes down a scrawny deer and Karen shows her how to skin and gut it, preserving the best meat by baking it dry in the coals of the fire. Mary-Beth, in turn, teaches Karen to brew a tea from some of the plants they find which helps ease the pains of her menses. 

After supper they often talk together by the fire, passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth, sharing stories of their childhoods. Karen is surprised to find that Mary-Beth comes from refined stock, and set out into this life for a sense of adventure. She expresses her shock that any woman would choose such a fate. Mary-Beth looks out into the darkness that gathers around their little camp and agrees. 

Those nights become something Karen looks forward to, as treasured and beautiful as beads on a string. She holds close to her heart the sight of Mary-Beth breaking into rare unashamed laughter, and the way her voice sounds as she reads aloud from one of the handful of books she insists on keeping hold of despite them serving -- in Karen’s opinion -- no useful purpose. 

Karen teaches Mary-Beth the art of acting. How to change one’s entire character by adopting a certain walk or style of hair. Which methods work best on what type of man and in what kind of situation. How to play coy, but not too coy that he becomes disinterested. How to cheat convincingly at poker, blackjack, and dice.

She also teaches her the ways a woman can kill a man, if she needs to. Where to shoot and not spend too many bullets. Where to stick a knife so he bleeds out silently.

She warns her not to try to choke anyone, nor to try and fight them off with fists only. Such things only end in more trouble, in Karen's experience.

Mary-Beth is a fast and eager learner. It's her idea to try robbing a stagecoach while dressed as men. Karen feels more than a little ridiculous with a bundle of dirty clothes shoved down her front to balance out the telltale curve of her breasts and some soot smudged across her upper lip in a semblance of a moustache, but she has to admit that it is an effective way of disguising their identities.

And Mary-Beth does look mighty fine in trousers and a jacket.

Their take from the coach is a good one, enough that the next time they end up in a town with a halfway decent saloon they decide to rent a room and stay a night as honest women. Well, mostly honest. Mary-Beth tells the proprietor that they're sisters on the way to their family plantation to claim their inheritance from a conniving aunt. She enjoys making up such stories, knitting entire lives for them out of thin air. Karen indulges her, and indulges the both of them with a bottle of the house's finest rum out of her personal savings.

That evening Karen sits by the fire and watches out of the corner of her eye as Mary-Beth takes advantage of the large copper bathtub in their rooms, enjoying the sight of her slim shoulders and wet hair gleaming over her naked back. When it’s her turn Karen tries not to think of sitting in the same water which so recently touched Mary-Beth. When she climbs from the tub she catches sight of Mary-Beth looking at her, and doesn’t miss the blush that blossoms on Mary-Beth’s cheeks when she realises that she’s been caught. 

They finish the rum sitting by the fire, Mary-Beth sitting on the floor with a book in her lap, leaning back against Karen’s legs, Karen’s hand moving gently over her hair. They speak little, both of them enjoying the sweet warmth of the alcohol and the comfort of the firelight. Both somber with the knowledge that there may not be many days like this for the two of them, so content to live the fullest in this moment. 

It feels like a natural continuation of that feeling when, after climbing into the large soft bed, the fire banked to softly glowing coals, Mary-Beth rolls over and gently brushes the back of her fingers over Karen’s cheek. Karen studies her face in the semi-darkness, the wolflike calm in her eyes. But no fear, this time.

“Karen,” she whispers, “may I?” 

Karen takes a long breath, drinking in the smell of Mary-Beth’s skin and the warmth of her body as she moves to press herself along Karen’s side. She reaches up to wrap Mary-Beth’s hand in her own and gently kisses her fingertips, one by one.

“You may.”

*

Afterwards, with Mary-Beth asleep beside her and a sweet soft ache in her heart and her throat to match the one between her legs, Karen realises that maybe it’s not so bad to let go of something beautiful, so long as you hold it close, for as long as it’s yours.


End file.
